The Send to Kindle app for the PC lets you send your personal documents from your Windows computer (a Mac version of the app isn't available yet) to your Kindle, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle Touch or your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. Those are the only devices supported by the Kindle Personal Document Service as of now.

If you have Wi-Fi, this is a pain-free way of getting your notes, PDFs, travel itineraries and other documents to your portable Kindle-friendly gadget, without connecting it to your computer.

On your PC, download the free Send to Kindle App at amazon.com/sendtokindle. When you're ready to send a document to a Kindle-friendly device, you can right-click on the document on your desktop and choose Send to Kindle. Or you can open the document in Microsoft Word or any viewer that can print and choose the option Print to File — since you're only creating a file and not sending to an actual printer, it doesn't matter that you may not have a printer. That will create a PDF file that you can right-click on and choose Send to Kindle.

You'll get the options to send to different devices registered to your Kindle email address, and you can choose to send via Wi-Fi (free) or Whispernet (Amazon's wireless connection that will cost you 15 cents per megabyte to use for sending documents in the U.S., 99 cents per megabyte abroad).

Your document is whisked off to your Kindle Library in the Amazon Cloud — you get 5 GB of free storage — which you can access from your portable gadget's Kindle app or the Kindle itself.

This is quicker than emailing, since you don't have to open your email application just to create and send a document. The advantage with using email, though, is that you can convert your document to the Kindle's .AZW format by typing "convert" in the email's subject line. That lets you annotate the document, take advantage of variable font sizes and more. I hope the conversion option will become available on updated versions of the Send to Kindle App.

So using Send to Kindle is a handy way to keep documents close to hand without printing them out to get lost or crumpled or rained on.